Managing Instability in Algeria: Elites and political change since 1995 by Isabelle Werenfels. Abingdon, Oxon, UK and New York: Routledge, 2007. xv + 170. appendices to p. 173. Notes to p. 206. Bibl. to p. 217. Index to p. 229. $120.

 

Isabelle Werenfels, a research associate at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, pulled off the remarkable feat in 2002 of freely interviewing over a hundred members of the Algerian elite, many of them over several sessions, in the course of five months of fieldwork, at a time when most Westerners circulated, if at all, under heavy police protection. Not only did this intrepid young Swiss researcher, with support of her ambassador, gain access to so many interview partners; she has succeeded, with additional clues from the colorful Algerian press, in making some sense of Algeria's opaque political system. This is a superbly crafted study of its fragmented elite; it is as rigorous as the fluid subject matter allows.

 

Her "political relevant elite" includes opposition as well as governmental actors, and she was able to interview one former leader of the Front Islamique du Salut (FIS) as well as various moderate Islamists coopted into the parliament. She divides the elite into three circles, an inner core of what Algerians call les décideurs and whom she identifies by reputation, a second circle of "actors with limited decision-making power but strong advisory power," and a third outer circle of those "having indirect and often only temporary influence on decision-making qua advisory, veto, bargaining or nuisance power" (pp. 23-24). She had to rely on a reputational approach to identify core and second circle actors, since formal positions could be misleading. As a general rule most cabinet ministers were in the second circle and members of parliament, along with various other actors such as Kabyle activists, business and trade union leaders, and various other civil society spokespeople, in the third. Obviously people moved between circles and could not be unambiguously pigeon-holed into one category even at one point in time, but the spectrum of core to periphery enabled her to examine trends. Impressionistically it seemed by the late 1990s, after the carnage of 1992-97 when 100,000 to 200,000 Algerians lost their lives, that many new actors were clamoring into third circle, constraining the core decision-makers and their clients in the second circle.

 

Through her semi-structured interviews Werenfels tried to get a sense of her interview partners' views on three policy issues: the privatization of state industries, educational reform, and political participation "of all political actors that claimed to adhere to democratic rules" (p. 94, i.e. national reconciliation). Based on these and other variables such as age and social background, Werenfels generated a five fold typology of elite ideal types ranging from "neo-dinosaur," people who wanted to go back to the secure albeit austere Boumediene era (1965-78) of the planned economy, to "neo-revolutionary," "radical democrat," "Islamist reformer," and "nationalist reformer." The ideal types are generated and concrete illustrations drawn from her data set, mainly from third generation (born after 1959) elites, most of whom were third circle. Given the problems of sampling and data collection, no pretense is made to aggregate and draw inferences about the weight of the respective tendencies over time. If most of the third generation expressed a reform oriented discourse, Werenfels also observed that more senior elite members in the second circle generally shared the rhetoric but did not practice what they preached. By far the more interesting part of this study is her analysis of "the structural factors which define….the corridor of action within which elites can operate" (p. 118).

 

A "corridor of action" is not an intermediary, like a party or an association, between an elite and the masses or segments of society such as workers, women, or a profession. Elite-mass linkages, in the sense of intermediaries, remain very weak in Algeria, weaker, say, than in neighboring Tunisia or Morocco. The state is weak, as is the rule of law. The "structural" factors that define a corridor are the actor's mental constructs ranging from generally shared norms and values to personal appreciations of one's informal political capital and obligations. One generally shared political perception is "le pouvoir," a fuzzy monolith that excuses personal responsibility for political actions and outcomes. The actors are "embedded" in a variety of informal, even imaginary economic and social networks including tribes, regions, and religious orders, and they must "engage in negotiations" as part of "the social game…[that has] little to do with political agendas," (p. 160) to survive politically. With globalization and structural adjustment some of the networks get defined by international treaties and conventions, which is another way of saying that some core actors, although currently benefiting as allies in the Global War on Terror, may feel some constraints due to potential sanctions against money laundering and other, worse crimes.

 

This book is a must read for students of comparative politics and political economy as well as Algeria specialists. It offers a thick, rich description of the contradictory values and practices that tend to transform rhetorical reformers into conservative rent-seekers. In addition to the divide and rule tactics of the core elite, itself ever divided, the various "corridors of action" offer a further explanation for inaction, complementing the conventional explanation that rentier oil economies tend to shrug off economic and political reform as long as oil prices stay high. Hopefully this book, at least, will become affordable in a paperback edition.